The Irascible Professor
SMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"The
secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know
how to do something well is to enjoy it."... ...Pearl Buck.

Commentary
of the Day - November 18, 2003: Another Route to Grade Inflation.
Guest commentary by Tina Blue.

I try to maintain
standards and to hold the line against grade inflation, I really do.

I am an adjunct
faculty member, which means, of course, no tenure. That also means
that student evaluations play a significant role when it comes time for
the department to decide on renewing my contract. We adjuncts are
always at risk of losing our jobs if we annoy too many students.

But idealist that
I am, I still act as though teaching neat stuff in an engaging way will
keep most students on my side. I won't pretend that my standards
are as rigorous as they were, say, twenty years ago, but I still do have
standards, and I do try to stick to them, no matter how much pressure is
applied or from what source.

What that means
is that I can actually be caught marking C's on mediocre essays, even though
I am all too uncomfortably aware that some of my colleagues would give
the same papers B's or even A's.

So imagine my
surprise when I glanced over my final grade sheets this past semester and
discovered that I had only given three C's in one class and four in another!

Surely that wasn't
possible. I distinctly recalled marking quite a few C papers during
the semester. So I checked my final class rosters against my grade
book. I noticed one thing immediately: there at the end of the semester,
my section enrollments were very small. That fact had registered
with me more or less as I marked finals and recorded final grades, but
at the end of the semester my awareness of such details is swamped by the
rush to get all my grading done and to turn in the grade sheets in by the
deadline.

But the fact is,
my classes have always been overenrolled. Like most teachers, I inevitably
lose a few during the semester, but not all that many.

This past semester,
though, my classes had shrunk significantly. In each of my "Introduction
to Poetry" sections, I had started out with 45 students. But by the end
of the semester, I had only 22 in one class and 25 in the other.
That degree of shrinkage had never happened to me before.

As I compared
my final rosters with the grade book, however, I discovered who it was
that had dropped my course.

Almost every student
who was getting a C in the course, or in danger of getting a C, had dropped
out. Even a few that looked as though they were likely to receive
B's had dropped the course.

No wonder almost
everyone who stayed through the entire course received either an A or a
B final grade. Nearly all the C students had abandoned ship.

The thing is,
I know that many of the students who dropped my course were actually enjoying
it. But as I was told by one girl I ran into a couple of weeks after
she dropped the class, a lot of them just don't feel they can risk getting
a "bad" grade -- and in today's academic environment, a C is definitely
a bad grade, In fact, a B might even be low enough to seriously damage
their records, cost them their scholarships, or hurt their chances of getting
into their preferred major or into the graduate program of their choice.

I think this puts
an intolerable burden on our shoulders. We should be able to grade
our students fairly, without worrying that giving out anything less than
A's will destroy some kid's life.

A lot of schools
and majors effectively "redline" their applicants at a certain outrageously
high GPA. For example, students who want to major in physical therapy,
social welfare, education, or any one of a number of other popular majors
here at KU are told that they need to maintain a certain GPA to be considered.
Often that GPA seems to be set quite reasonably -- usually at 2.5, sometimes
at 3.0

But in reality,
students with less than a 3.5 GPA are not likely even to be considered
for admission to their chosen fields. Their applications are tossed
as soon as their ordinary GPA is noted.

And since the
pool of applicants often includes a large number of students with perfect
or near-perfect GPA's, even a student with, say, a 3.5 GPA, might not have
that great a chance of being admitted.

But a lot of those
stellar GPA's are achieved and maintained by the decidedly weasel-like
expedient of dropping out of every single course that is in any way challenging,
and diligently shopping for "pud" courses and for instructors known to
give easy grades. You can't really blame students for doing this
when the majors and professional schools encourage grade shopping.
If all that matters is grades, then all that will matter to students is
grades.

Unfortunately,
even as I give a student an honest C -- sometimes even a rather generous
C -- I know that he or she will be competing with students who are getting
much higher grades for the same quality of work.

And as soon as
he realizes it, he will probably drop my course and switch to the instructor
who is giving that other guy such lovely grades.

The
IP comments: Tina Blue's observations are absolutely correct as far as
they go. However, she does not focus on the underlying cause.
Course withdrawal policies at most American colleges and universities have
eroded over the years to the point where students can drop a class almost
up to the date of the final exam for the flimsiest of reasons. When
the IP was an undergraduate at Berkeley back in the "dark ages", a student
had 10 class days at the beginning of the semester to drop and add courses.
After that, getting out of the course for anything short of a major medical
crisis was just about impossible. The ever more generous deadlines
for withdrawing from courses has encouraged the kind of behavior Tina observes
in her classes, and makes it even more difficult for those of us who still
believe that grades should mean something to hold the line on grade inflation.